Squid Game character 강새벽, 067 played by actor model 정호연, is a really layered and complex character, and you can miss a lot of details if you don’t know some context.
새벽 means “dawn”, so I’ll leave the interpretation of that up to you. It is a North Korean character 강새벽 played by a South Korean actor 정호연, and just imagine the significance of what that one persona carries in itself.
As some folks have already noted, at the beginning of the series she has her North Korean accent. But then while she’s in the game, she has a South Korean accent.
That’s a strategic move on her part to not want to be ostracized, and we see some other characters mocking her for being North Korean.
That’s embedded history of colonization and “divide and conquer”.
As I talk about very frequently in my posts, the United States divided Korea into North and South Koreas.
U.S. colonizers divided a people into two, and the U.S. military still occupies South Korea.
And because of the continued colonization by the United States, the Koreas remain divided.
And this colonization has caused conflict among both South and North Koreans about how to feel about each other.
There’s generational trauma, people whose families were divided, people who lost their homes forever.
That is some colonizer bullshi–
Okay, back to 강새벽.
So she fled North Korea with her family, her father, mother, brother. Her father didn’t make it, her mother is stuck in China, and her brother is now at an orphanage.
So she fled one Korea to try to find a better life in the other Korea.
And while we don’t know exactly what her life was in North Korea, we can see she has experienced unspeakable loss and trauma in capitalist South Korea.
I’ll say it again, and I will keep saying it, colonization and capitalism are lethal and fatal.
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